By empowering users with information that is often overlooked and facilitating in-person discourse, we believe we can create a platform that allows people to unite through their local government and ultimately be more effective citizens.

My Roles

Competitive Analysis

Sketching

Wireframing

Visual Design

Interaction Design

Adobe XD Prototyping

Logo Design

Team

Ilma Bilic

Francisco “Paco” Gallardo

Jordan Kaplan

Malcolm Maturen

Roy “Teddy” Okerstrom

Addison Viene

Year

2018

Duration

4 months

PROBLEM

​Despite 24/7, wall-to-wall coverage of national politics, local and state political information is still difficult to find. When it comes to local elections, people tend to vote simply along party lines. Our goal is have voters make more informed, confident choices through online engagement and discourse.

Political engagement app

What does the current voting system look like?

In order to redesign the system, we had to go through the process of the current system. From discussing our own experience voting and asking other about their experiences, we've developed an understanding that there are many types of voters. Despite their differences we knew the experience was identical, the user does some research on the candidates, waits in a long line and fills out a paper form in an isolated room. We chose to focus on the educating and research portion of this process.

Who is the user?

Our personas consisted of a political activist, uninformed voter, informed voter, and the anti-persona; the troll.

Competitive Analysis

In order to understand the market and our competitors strengths/weaknesses, I performed a competitive analysis.

Brainstorm

Spending less than 30 seconds on each sketch, we rapidly sketched different solutions that we could build upon. We chose to brainstorm quickly on ideas because it allowed us to think more creatively and rely less on constraints. Below are my sketches.

Storyboard

To gain an understanding of how the user would use the app, we created two storyboards for the two different purposes the app serves. The first purpose is to inform users, so the user swipes though different candidate information. Our second storyboard explored the gamification aspect of the app that we wanted to include but didn't end up exploring further.

Question Option Criteria Analysis (QOC)

In order to create a design rationale, a QOC was created to discuss trade-offs on design options. Below is an example of a critical feature of finding information concerning politicians. To visualize our ideas I created wire frames representing each design option. View full QOC analysis here.

Prototype

Creating a paper prototype allowed us to observe the mobile interactions and prototype new solutions faster than using a digital prototyping tool.

Paper Prototype

Going through the interactions by physically moving each component allowed us to visualize the process. By creating a video we were able to analyze what parts of the prototype worked and didn't work.

Feedback

I conducted two out of three usability tests with the paper prototype and had users discuss their thought process throughout the test to gain their insights.

​

One of the key takeaways from our testing sessions was that our users had a tough time navigating across the mobile application and expressed that more feedback was needed in our mobile application to reduce the gulf of execution.

​

​

Digital Prototype

We created a bottom bar to address navigation issues and included more pop-ups to validate the users experience.